Synopses & Reviews
- A refreshing and relevant new theme for composition courses. As the first composition reader to focus on cognition, or the processes of thinking, Mind Readings introduces a fresh trove of material that appeals to students' perennial interest in their own, and others', inner lives. The book invites students to explore irresistible issues like the many "selves" that make up personal identity, the boundary between human and animal intelligence, and the difference between male and female thinking, while introducing them to interdisciplinary inquiry and academic writing. Mind Readings transforms students' explorations of perception, textual analysis, and effective communication into skilled thinking, reading, and writing.
- Readings that bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities. The 53 readings reflect the range of disciplines students will encounter throughout their college careers. Selections from the humanities include 19 personal essays, five scholarly essays, and eight classic works of short fiction by authors such as Ian Frazier, Alice Walker, John Berger, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Thirty selections from a variety of disciplines in the sciences and social sciences include works by Deborah Blum and Daniel L. Schacter. By offering examples of both personal and academic writing within each of its six chapters, Mind Readings invites students to make connections between their own interests and experiences and broader intellectual questions.
- Editorial apparatus that helps students become capable academic thinkers and writers. Mind Readings offers students the practical pedagogical support they need to read effectively and produce thoughtful academic writing,including a general introduction; extensive chapter introductions; detailed headnotes; suggestions for pre-reading, journal, or discussion activities before each selection; and two sets of discussion questions after each selection which help students to read closely, make connections among texts, and write formal assignments.
Synopsis
How do your senses and memory work? What is the nature of consciousness? What sets your intelligence apart from that of animals and computers? Mind Readings urges your students to think carefully about such questions -- questions about cognition, or the process of thinking itself. Because many of the topics in the book deal directly with the skills students need in college -- such as interpreting and remembering what they read and communicating the ideas they find -- students are likely to improve these crucial skills. The readings themselves are memorable and worth talking about. Deborah Blum tries to convince your students that emotional sensitivity gives enormous advantages to women. Students weigh Francine Patterson and Wendy Gordon's claim that Koko, the gorilla who has mastered human language, deserves to be considered a person. A rich editorial apparatus helps students read texts closely, connect the ideas they encounter in the text to their life experiences, and extend the book's ideas to larger issues such as race, cultural memory, and the social conception of selfhood.
About the Author
GARY COLOMBO is a professor at Los Angeles City College and is co-editor with Robert Cullen and Bonnie Lisle of Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing, Fifth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001) and with Bonnie Lisle and Sandra Mano of Frame Work: Culture, Storytelling, and College Writing (Bedford Books, 1997).
Table of Contents
Introduction: Mind Readings and College Writing
1. Reading the Senses: From Sight to Insight
Ian Frazer, Take the F
Barry Lopez, A Passage of the Hands
Diane Ackerman, Taste: The Social Sense
Mark Slouka, Listening for Silence
Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synott, The Olfactory Revolution
K.C. Cole, Seeing Things
Georgina Kleege, The Mind's Eye
Bill McKibben, Television and the Twilight of the Senses
Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature
2. Reading Memory: Rebuilding the Past
Scott Russell Sanders, The Inheritance of Tools
Loren Eiseley, The Brown Wasps
Daniel L. Schacter, Building Memories: Encoding and Retrieving the Past and the Present
Patricia Hampl, Memory and Imagination
Susan Engel, Then and Now: Creating a Self Through the Past
Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Memories
Maxine Hong Kingston, Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
bell hooks, Columbus: Gone but Not Forgotten
3. Reading The Self: Ghosts in the Machine?
Robert Sapolsky, Ego Boundaries, or the Fit of My Father's Shirt
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, What Is The Self?
Alice Walker, Everyday Use
Arnold M. Ludwig, Living Backwards
Ruben Martinez and Claudia Chiawei O'Hearn, Technicolor
Roy F. Baumeister, The Self and Society: Changes, Problems, and Opportunities
Mary Catherine Bateson, A Mutable Self
Philip Kitcher, Whose Self Is It Anyway?
Jean Bethke Elshtain, To Clone or Not to Clone
4. Reading Other Minds: Inside the Black Box
Roger C. Schank, Understanding Other People's Stories
James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Narrative Imagination
Edward T. Hall, Hidden Culture
Mick Fadullo, Mrs. Cassadore
Jean Hollander, Cops and Writers
Deborah Blum, Heart to Heart: Sex Differences in Emotion
Andrew Sullivan, What's So Bad about Hate?
James Garbarino, Rejected and Neglected, Ashamed and Depressed
Mark Dery, Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns
5. Reading Animal Minds: Objects or Equals?
John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, Talking to the Owls and Butterflies
John Berger, Why Look at Animals?
Faith McNulty, Mouse
Charles Siebert, The Artifice of the Natural
Frans de Waal, The Whole Animal
Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Murder in a Zoo
Francine Patterson and Wendy Gordon, The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas
Peter Singer, Equality for Animals?
Paul Shepard, Rights and Kindness: A Can of Worms
6. Reading Cyber Minds: The Internet to Artificial Intelligence
Ellen Ullman, Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, The Virtual Barrio
Sherry Turkle, Who Am We?
Claudia Springer, Muscular Circuitry
William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic
Douglas R. Hofstadter, The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation
Maureen Caudill, Redefining the Measure of Mankind
Hans Moravec, Grandfather Clause
Margaret Wertheim, Cyber Soul-Space